Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
account of Service's life as a youth in latenineteenth-century
Scotland, and illuminates
his portrait with letters, diaries, and
manuscripts still in the possession of the
Service family. Many of these were not consulted
by previous biographers, and offer a
novel glimpse of Service. Vagabond of Verse
also includes sixteen leaves of black and
white photos.
At 416 pages, however, the book may
seem padded, especially considering the
copious extracts Mackay makes from
Service's autobiography. Although Mackay
discusses Service in the context of inter-war
Europe, with its rising facist and communist
movements and vibrant literary scene,
his narrative is too close to Service's own.
He details Service's literary liaisons in Paris
and Monte Carlo, but he does not engage
with the intellectual currents of the era.
Although Service expressed his most profound
political thoughts in the verse he
wrote following the Second World War,
Mackay barely explores this portion of
Service's career.
Equally disconcerting for the scholar is the
lack of explicit references for the sources
Mackay uses to clear up long-standing
myths and biographical inaccuracies perpetuated
(and perpetrated) by the late Carl
Klinck in Robert Service: A Biography (1976)
and G. Wallace Lockhart in On the Trail of
Robert Service (1991). One is unable to double-check
Mackay's own work.
Mackay refrains, for example, from challenging
Service's account of his early publications
in Scottish periodicals. He presents
one of these fugitive poems, "Her Part and
Mine" (1890), but otherwise leaves the
reader unsure of whether any others actually
appeared. He repeatedly notes that
Service is an unreliable source at the best of
times, and his facile acceptance of Service's
claims here and elsewhere undermines the
reader's faith in his thoroughness.
The Edinburgh Scotsman remarked,
Vagabond of Verse is "not inspired nor
inspirational." Mackay gives readers "the
simple facts of the case," making his work a
welcome addition to Canadian literary
biography, but this same predilection for
points of fact also succeeds in dispelling a
great deal of the fancy in which Service revelled
as he wrote his life's story.
Geography of Nowhere
Trevor Ferguson
The Fire Line. HarperCollins $25.00
Reviewed by Nancy Pagh
With his fifth novel, Montreal writer Trevor
Ferguson returns to the landscape of
British Columbia's North Coast, the setting
for his High Water Chants (1977). Most of
The Fire Line takes place in what Reed
Kitchen, the central character, calls "God's
country otherwise known as nowhere"—
the (so-called) perpetually wet and interminably
cool territory near Prince Rupert.
Flanking the bulk of the novel with a
drama played out among the flames and
char of a forest fire near Prince George,
Ferguson creates a story of mythic and
darkly humorous contrasts. "For we live,"
Reed Kitchen explains near the end of the
novel, "upon a world atrocious in its pain
and fabulous in its spectacle." That is the
geography of The Fire Line.
Reed Kitchen, a career railroad worker
with "sub par circulation," claims he is
seduced into accepting a transfer to the rain
country by the promise of subtropical
climes. Riding the artery of the continent to
"the end of the earth," he soon finds he was
duped about the climate and that his reputation
as a jabbermouth has preceded him.
Train crews have tormented the men of В 8c
В Gang 4 (a stationary crew rebuilding the
Green River Bridge) with warnings about
Reed Kitchen:
He was a chronic yakker who did not
know when to shut up and he could not
182